Go Leave Your Kids Alone in a Park

Stop worrying: go leave your children in a playground somewhere. "It
almost seems that, the safer our society becomes, the more we feel
compelled to ramp up the fears about unlikely dangers," argues Lenore Skenazy
at The Guardian. She's defending her decision to declare last Saturday a special day--"Take our children to the park ... and leave them there" day.

I'd
come up with the idea as a way for neighbourhood children (including
mine) to meet each other, and even be forced to entertain themselves.
Try it for half an hour, I'd suggested, just to break the ice. I said
it was for ages seven or eight and up, because seven is the age kids
walk to school, by themselves, in most of the world.

The crime
rate in America, Skenazy points out, is actually "lower today than it
was in the 70s and 80s," when children playing out of doors
unsupervised was considered normal. Why, then, is unsupervised play so
rare today? She thinks it's because "we have been force-fed a media
diet of 'You and your loved ones are in terrible danger from (fill in
the blank)' for about a generation." In her view, we hear too much about such everyday dangers--makeup, cancer-causing cell phones, and kidnapping--when the
world is actually getting safer.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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